Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us - and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he has tracked down some of the nation's most brutal murderers. Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for America's most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.

Profiler Roy Hazelwood is one of the world's leading experts on the strangest and most dangerous of all aberrant offenders - the sexual criminal. In Dark Dreams he reveals the twisted motive and thinking that go into the most reprehensible crimes. He also catalogs the innovative and remarkably effective techniques that allow law enforcement agents to construct psychological profiles of the offenders who commit these crimes.

Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of

In the horrifying annals of American crime, the infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and Berkowitz are writ large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and hypnotized by their monstrous, murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who's gotten ink for spilling blood, there's a bevy of all-but-forgotten homicidal fiends studding the bloody margins of US history.

The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to JonBenet Ramsey, the FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Sheds Light on the Mysteries That Won't Go Away

Did Lizzie Borden murder her own father and stepmother? Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence? Who killed JonBenet Ramsey? America's foremost expert on criminal profiling and 25-year FBI veteran John Douglas, along with author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, explores those tantalizing questions and more in this mesmerizing work of detection. With uniquely gripping analysis, the authors reexamine and reinterpret the accepted facts, evidence, and victimology of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime.

Devil in the Darkness: The True Story of Serial Killer Israel Keyes

He was a hard-working small business owner, an Army veteran, an attentive lover, and a doting father. But he was also something more, something sinister. A master of deception, he was a rapist, arsonist, and bank robber, and a new breed of serial killer, one who studied other killers to perfect his craft. He methodically buried kill-kits containing his tools of murder years before returning to reclaim them.

Similar Transactions

Former social worker S. R. Reynolds has never forgotten the mishandled case of 15-year-old Michelle Anderson, a vibrant beauty who went missing from Reynolds' Knoxville, Tennessee, neighborhood years earlier. Aided by her old professor, famed forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass, Reynolds picks up the trail of this cold case. As she presses neglected pieces of the puzzle into place, Reynolds unearths a string of heinous kidnappings and rapes across the South, crimes that span decades.

Wicked Takes the Witness Stand: A Tale of Murder and Twisted Deceit in Northern Michigan

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.

The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez

Decades after Richard Ramirez left 13 dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder. Philip Carlo's classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined. The story of Ramirez is a bizarre and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.

The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers

Hollywood's make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can't hold a candle to real-life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the serial killer phenomenon.

The Misbegotten Son

An account of the crimes of Arthur Shawcross describes how the paroled child killer shot, stabbed, suffocated, and strangled 16 Rochester, New York, prostitutes and examines how the legal system failed his victims.

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in ancient Rome, through 15th-century France, up to such notorious contemporary cases as cannibal/necrophile Ed Kemper, Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and the emergence of what he classifies as "the serial rampage killer" such as Andrew Cunanan.

Murder in the Family

On March 15th, 1987 police in Anchorage, Alaska arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.

The Last Victim: A True-Life Journey into the Mind of a Serial Killer

It started with a college course assignment, then escalated into a dangerous obsession. Eighteen-year-old honor student Jason Moss wrote to men whose body counts had made criminal history: men named Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez, and Gacy. Posing as their ideal victim, Jason seduced them with his words. One by one they wrote him back, showering him with their madness and violent fantasies. Then the game spun out of control. John Wayne Gacy revealed all to Jason - and invited his pen pal to visit him in prison.... It was an offer Jason couldn't turn down. Even if it made him....

The Evil Within

Throughout his time as a murder squad detective, Trevor Marriott has seen firsthand the wanton slayings and butcheries that have been committed by both men and women who have warped, depraved and sadistic minds. In this fascinating and chilling book, he examines the world's most notorious serial killers and the despicable crimes they committed.

Rough Trade: A Shocking True Story of Prostitution, Murder, and Redemption

Early one morning in May, 1997, a young couple in the mountains of Colorado spotted a man dragging a body up a secluded trail. The man fled, leaving behind a bloody, dying woman. The investigation into the death of young street-walker Anita Paley would lead from that idyllic spot to the seamy underbelly of Denver and a world of prostitution, drug dealers, and violent criminals. And it would expose the lives of suspect Robert Riggan and Anita's friend Joanne Cordova, a former cop-turned-crack-addict and hooker.

Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer

While serving a life sentence for the murder of a young girl, Jack Unterweger wrote seven books, saw his critically acclaimed autobiography made into a film, and became a cause celebre among influential Austrian literati who successfully campaigned for his release. Riding high on the fame, he arrived in Los Angeles where he nurtured his career as a journalist. Then, one by one, Hollywood prostitutes started turning up dead. Unterweger covered the story. There was a reason why his reporting of the crimes seemed so vivid.

Ice and Bone: Tracking an Alaskan Serial Killer

Ice and Bone is the chilling true account of how a demented murderer initially evaded police and avoided conviction only to slip back into the shadows and kill again. Journalist and writer Monte Francis tells the harrowing story of what eventually led to Wade's capture and reveals why the true scope of his murderous rampage is only now, more than a decade later, coming into view.

Precious Victims: Penguin True Crime

The police in Jersey County, Illinois, accepted Paula Sims' story of a masked kidnapper who snatched her baby girl, Lorelei, from her bassinet. Three years later, her second newborn daughter suffered an identical fate - and this time the police were unable to stop searching until they had discovered the whole horrifying truth. This is the full terrifying story of twisted sexuality and hate seething below the surface of a seemingly normal family and of the massive investigation and nerve-shattering trial that made the unthinkable a reality.

Perfect Husband: The True Story of the Trusting Bride Who Discovered Her Husband Was a Coldblooded Killer

As seen on A Current Affair - the shocking story of Florida's most bizarre multiple murder case. As Lisa and Kosta Fotopoulos lay sleeping in their home, a burglar broke in and shot Lisa at point-blank range in the head. Miraculously, she survived to learn the sobering truth about her would-be assassin - and about her sociopathic husband's deadly agenda.

House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler

To his neighbors, Anthony Sowell was a friendly and helpful former Marine. But they didn't know about his dark side - or the gruesome secret inside his house. Sowell's secret life was revealed to the nation on October 29, 2009, when a Cleveland Police SWAT team entered his house to arrest him for an alleged rape. They didn't find Sowell, but they encountered a nightmarish scene: two decomposed bodies in his third-floor living room. Eight more bodies were hidden throughout the house and buried in the back yard.

Dead Reckoning

Happy and retired, Tom and Jackie Hawks lived a charmed life in sunny Southern California. They were delighted when former child star Skylar Deleon and his pregnant wife, Jennifer, offered cash to purchase their 55-foot yacht, the Well Deserved. But a trial voyage turned into a nightmare. Out at sea, the Hawkses begged for their lives as they were forced to sign everything over to Skylar. In return, they were tied to the ship's anchor and thrown overboard - alive.

Poisoned Love

On November 6, 2000, paramedics answered a call to find Kristin Rossum sobbing. Her husband, Greg de Villers, wasn't breathing, and she claimed he had overdosed on drugs after learning that she was leaving him. But family and friends weren't buying Kristin's story - particularly the idea that Greg would take his own life. The daughter of a well-to-do California family, Rossum was a brainy blonde beauty whose talent for toxicology had won her a post at the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office. But her sweet smile masked a dark side.

Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee

When Bill Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth began their romance, they unknowingly set in motion a diabolical plot that would end with them murdered in their own home, Hayworth holding their mercifully unharmed infant. Chris was a CIA agent who was concerned about Jenelle. Seeing the cyberbullying she had endured, and worried for her safety, Chris got in touch with Jenelle's protective parents and her devoted boyfriend, warning them that Payne and Hayworth were a danger to Jenelle.

Publisher's Summary

Fifteen-year-old Tony Ciaglia had everything a teenager could want: good grades, good athletic skills, and good friends - until he suffered a horrific head injury at summer camp. Pronounced clinically dead three times by helicopter paramedics before he reached a hospital, Ciaglia lapsed into a coma. When he emerged, his right side was paralyzed and he had to relearn how to walk, talk, and even how to eat. The areas of his brain that were damaged required him to take countless pills to control his emotions and rages. Abandoned and shunned by his friends, he began writing to serial killers on a whim and discovered that his traumatic brain injury - which made him an outcast to his peers - enabled him to emotionally connect with notorious murderers in a unique way.

Soon many of America's most dangerous psychopaths were revealing heinous details to Tony about their crimes - even those they'd never been convicted of. The killers opened up to him, trusted him, and called him a "best friend". But there was a price. As Tony found himself being drawn deeper and deeper into their violent worlds of murder, rape, and torture, he was pushed to the brink of despair and, at times, forced to question his own sanity - until he found a way to put his unusual gift to use. Asked by investigators for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for help in solving a murder, Tony began launching his own personal searches for forgotten victims, incredibly with clues often provided to him voluntarily by the killers themselves.

The Serial Killer Whisperer takes listeners into the minds of murderers in a way that has never been done before - straight from a killer's thoughts. It is also an inspiring (albeit sometimes terrifying) tale of an American family whose idyllic life is shattered by a terrible accident and how healing and closure came to a tormented man in the most unlikely way: by connecting with monsters.

True conversations between convicted serial killers and one young man that detail the serial killers crimes in every graphic and horrific detail. Very well written and narrated. Please do not download if you would be offended by detailed murder and crimes that to the general population are unimaginable because you will be offended. This book is for you if you enjoy true crime. Awesome book.

First off, this book pulls no punches. A lot of it contains letters from REAL serial killers, and believe me, they are even more messed up than you can imagine! The author did an excellent job of letting the letters pretty much guide you through the story. I had never heard of most of these serial killers, but the author gives them a voice that makes them unforgettable. This book is graphic, and very gory at times, so be warned. However, if you like true crime books, this one is a MUST. Imagine your 3 favorite true crime books rolled into 1, and this is what you get.

This book was better than average. It is very graphic. I have read a lot about serial killers, but this definitely adds something.

For me, the book was more about Tony and the way his family dealt with a very difficult situation in a humane, kind, and ego-free manner than it was about the serial killers, per se.

I suppose from my prior reading on the subject of serial killers, I was aware of the depravity of which the human mind is capable. What I took away from this book is admiration for the courage shown by Tony's family. It couldn't have been easy for them to let their disabled son write to serial killers, but instead of judging him, they made the best of it. The truth of the matter is, had his parents behaved as almost any parents would, it would likely have pushed Tony over the edge and likely resulted in his own death. Interesting book in that regard.

The narrator Alan Sklar is one of the best narrators living. He nailed this one.****warning - this is not just a true crime book. This book is filled with actual letters/conversations of the killers themselves. It contains very descriptive graphic language.If you dont believe in capital punishment now you WILL after this book.

In 1996, FBI profiler John Douglas, (the inspiration for Thomas Harris' Agent Jack Crawford of "The Silence of the Lambs" (1988)) wrote a book with Mark Olshaker called "Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit." Douglas had profiled, and hunted, serial killers including Arthur Shawcross, who killed 13 people and Robert Hansen, an Alaska hunter who made his own real life version of Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game", taking women hostage, raping them, letting them go, and hunting them down in the wilderness.

Douglas is able, with great difficulty, to understand these psychopaths, but that work almost killed him. Tony Ciaglia, "The Serial Killer Whisperer" has Douglas' ability to communicate with the same psychopaths, but without the moral constraints and judgments that Douglas has. Ciaglia survived a traumatic brain injury, and gained the ability - and desire - to explore what creates and sustains these killers. Ciaglia is not, by any measure, a psychopath - but he does not have the filter that causes almost everyone to recoil in horror from these individuals. Ciaglia's family supports his 'hobby', and he has helped victims families. His story is much more fascinating than any of the killers in the book.

I've heard the phrase "the banality of evil" for years, but I didn't quite understand what it meant until I listened to "The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man's Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World's Most Terrifying Killers" (2012). Hannah Arendt wrote a book called "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1963). Earley's book gives a picture of individual psychopaths while Arendt deals with the political conditions that created a whole sociopathic society, Nazi Germany. What fascinated me about both books is that, after pushing through the sheer horror of individual killers or an entire society of killers, just how pathetic and repetitive the people who do these things really are. It's almost as if the lack of conscious causes no sense of self, leaving the psychopath to create himself only in relation to how he controls others.

The book is more graphic than Ann Rule's books - it contains numerous excerpts from serial killers' letters recalling the details of their crimes. I liked the narrator's voice, but the audio could have used an edit - I kept hearing distracting intakes of breath.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Serial Killer Whisperer?

The graphic letters

Have you listened to any of Alan Sklar’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I haven't, but I was very impressed.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, but I would listed for 5+ hours at a time.

Any additional comments?

Very graphic, if you are easily offended don't buy this book. If you want a glimpse into the inner workings of a serial killer's mind this is just the book for you. I have read a lot on the topic and let me tell you I was shocked at the level of disclosure in this book. Amazing read!